Background:Dignity is an important ideal in the nursing of older women who need municipal care. Dignity can be challenged when health is impaired by feeling grief and suffering associated with bodily changes and impaired functions. Aim and research questions:The study aimed to deepen the understanding of the meaning of dignity in the life of fragile older women who daily needed help from municipal care service. The research questions are: What is older women’s experience of dignity, and what is it (...) not to be met with dignity when needing service from municipality care? Research design: The study has a qualitative design, and the methodology is based on Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics. Ten women receiving municipal care, aged from 66 to 91 were interviewed in their home environments. Kvale and Brinkmanns’ three levels of interpretation were applied in the analysis of the interviews: self-understanding, a critical understanding based on common sense, and theoretical understanding. Ethical considerations: The study follows the guidelines for good scientific practice according to the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Results: The interviews revealed fragments of the women’s unique life history. Two themes emerged from the interpretation: Confirming encounters provide human dignity; and Not being confirmed as a human being violates human dignity. Conclusions:For the women, dignity is about feeling seen and understood by the individual nurse and this takes place both in conversation and in bodily care. Not being seen or confirmed gives rise to suffering. The reason for this seems to be lack of competence on the part of the staff or little continuity. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to illuminate the significance of the long-term influence of bodily changes on the perception of self after stroke by means of narrative interviews with 23 stroke survivors. A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach inspired by the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur is the methodological framework. Zahavi’s understanding of the embodied self and Leder’s concept of dys-appearance along with earlier research on identity guide the comprehensive understanding of the theme. The meaning of bodily changes after stroke (...) can be understood as living with an altered perception of self. Stroke survivors perceive their bodies as fragile, unfamiliar and unreliable and tend to objectify them. The weak and discomforting body that ‘cannot’ demands constant, comprehensive awareness to keep itself in play. These long-term and often permanent consequences of bodily weakness may turn stroke survivors’ intentionality inwards, away from external activities and projects and relationships with others. Negative judgements from others are added to lost roles and positions and threaten the vulnerable self. Stroke survivors try to regain familiarity with their body by their life-long project of testing its boundaries. Mastering important tasks helps them strengthen their self-concept. Health care workers should be aware of the embodied self and engage in long-term dialogues with stroke survivors to strengthen positive perceptions of body and self. More research is needed to understand destructive post-stroke phenomena such as fatigue and pain and to find effective methods to help stroke survivors regain wholeness of body and self. (shrink)

An increasing number of people worldwide are living with chronic conditions that have an aspect of bodily fragility as part of the condition or as an effect of treatment. In this article, I explore the temporal experience of bodily fragility and the particularities of consciousness states among people with the chronic condition osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) in Denmark. My aim is threefold. First, my goal is to give an insight into life with OI, a rare and rarely (...) studied condition. Second, I shed light on bodily fragility, a theme that lives in the shadows of other analytical foci in anthropology. Third, I will contribute to the anthropological understanding of the connection among body, physical environment, and consciousness. I argue that the lifeworlds of people with OI are haunted by mental and bodily memories and fearful future scenarios, which makes the past and the future collapse into the present. (shrink)

What are the ethics of child genital cutting? In a recent issue of the journal, Duivenbode and Padela (2019) called for a renewed discussion of this question. Noting that modern health care systems...

The paper outlines an attempt at phenomenological description of two intermingled dimensions of human vulnerability. First, vulnerability understood as an essential dimension in the constitution of embodiment and second, vulnerability in regard to trust, as a form of emotive interpersonal disposition. In either case, vulnerability does not only refer to mere physical fragility but to the situational horizon where from emerge progressive anticipations of “possible harm”. According to this account, vulnerability appears as a practical horizon of emotional awareness of (...) risk involving not only bodily fragility but a dimension of concrete existence of individual persons, namely, the intimate affectation of being harmed, injured or deprived or a practical aim. In this context the paper claims for a second and more radical sense of vulnerability that problematize the classical account of emotive protentionality, following Anthony Steinbock´s description of moral emotions. In this regard, vulnerability of trust involves an emotional risk and fragility that opens to consideration a dimension of human existence revealing human persons in their absolute and individual concreteness. (shrink)

Apart from being a pervasive concept of present-day law, human dignity is a phenomenon regularly experienced by people in their lives. Yet before any protection for it can be advanced, it is imperative that an explanation of how human dignity is at all possible be established, including a description of its constitutive figures. Paul Ricoeur made a significant contribution to the lacking phenomenology of human dignity. Despite only rarely using the term dignity directly, he identified and described its three constitutive (...) and interdependent figures—self-esteem, self-respect, and recognition—and embedded them amongst such notions as self, identity, narrative, passivity, bodiliness, fragility, morality, and law. He activated the phenomenological, existentialist, and hermeneutic legacies in understanding human dignity and succeeded in modifying certain sharp-edged structures that have periodically been associated with the notion of human dignity. In this paper I argue that human dignity is a high-ranking topic in Ricoeur’s writings, identify and synthesize the phenomenology of human dignity scattered throughout his works, and reveal the profound existential aspects he attributed to it. Finally, I discuss and evaluate his phenomenological-existentialistic account of human dignity, particularly taking into consideration the contemporary use of human dignity in law and its associated discourses. (shrink)

Since its outbreak, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated discourses and practices that directly refer to the semantic universe usually connected to disability and illness. Words such as ‘pre-existing conditions’, ‘risk groups’, ‘accessibility’, and ‘vulnerability’ have become everyday elements of official and informal communications across the globe. In this article, I explore the contradictions that arise from such uses through the lens of crip studies. In the first part, I observe how the idea of vulnerability became mainstream, moving from being usually (...) attached to disability and illness to being depicted as a universal condition. Such a shift serves the double purpose of reinstating the predominance of able-bodiedness as the preferable normalcy and invisibilising the particular conditions of disabled and chronically ill people in the pandemic. In the second part, I discuss the perverse use of the expressions ‘risk group’ and ‘underlying conditions’ as biopolitical tools to reinforce already existing forms of oppression. The third part comprises a reflection on accessibility and the sudden advent of working-from-home. Finally, I reflect on confinement and interdependence as key concepts to draft a politics of transformation that moves from disability and chronic illness to include all experiences of intersectional oppression. As other markers of oppression, illness and disability can determine the possibilities of survival through the crisis, not only because they are linked to bodily fragility but also because of the systemic violence they are immersed in. The knowledge produced from a place of vulnerability can hence show interesting elements to better understand the challenges of this pandemic through an intersectional perspective. (shrink)

In this book we offer a theory of the self, whose core ideas are that the self is a process of self-representing, and this process aims mainly at defending the self-conscious subject against the threat of its metaphysical inconsistence. In other words, the self is essentially a repertoire of psychological manoeuvres whose outcome is a self-representation aimed at coping with the fundamental fragility of the human subject. Our picture of the self differs from both the idealist and the eliminative (...) approaches widely represented in contemporary discussion. Against the idealist approach, we deny that the self is something primitive and logically prior. Rather, we take it to be the result of a process of construction that starts with subpersonal unconscious processes. On the other hand, we also reject the anti-realistic, eliminative argument that, from the non-primary, derivative nature of the self, infers its status as an illusory by-product of real neurobiological events, devoid of any explanatory role. (shrink)

Interactional expertise is here to stay. Undoubtedly, in some sense of the word, one can attain a linguistic expert level within a field without full scale practical immersion. In the context of the idea of embodied cognition, the claim is provocative. How can an interactional expert acquire full linguistic competence without the simultaneous bodily engagement and real life interaction needed to get the language right? How can one understand the concept of hammering if one has never seen a hammer (...) or felt the weight of the iron head on a fragile thumb? Here I will explore a strange and second-hand way in which bodily engagement could have an impact on our linguistic abilities; this is via the so called mirror neuron system. Since the mirror neuron system blurs the distinction between first and third person activity it can help us understand some of the enigmatic aspects of interactional expertise and pose further questions for research.Keywords: Mirror neurons; Interactional expertise; Contributory expertise; Embodied knowledge; Evolution. (shrink)

In this article, I show how traditional Thomistic claims about the creation and fall of the first human beings—or “Adam”—are compatible with the claims of evolutionary science concerning human origins. Aquinas claims that God created Adam in a state or condition of original justice, wholly subject to God and so fully virtuous, as well as internally immune to bodily corruption, suffering, and natural death. In defense of “Aquinas's Adam,” I first argue that affirming that the prelapsarian Adam was internally (...) immune to suffering and death does not require denying that these things predated his emergence within evolutionary history, or that he would have faced real challenges posed to him by his natural environment. Next, I rebut the claim that Adam must have been spiritually and morally fragile, given the traits he inherited from his evolutionary ancestors. Finally, I dispute the claim that Adam only could have fallen if he existed in a spiritually and morally fragile state. (shrink)

This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies – focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer – to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance – political/economic as well as self-disciplinary – with the nexus of estrangement, which can denote both the distancing (...) of otherness and self-division. Second is the realm of feeling, of phantasmatic projection and of the ways in which the biopolitical becomes reciprocally, discursively, enmeshed in a wider cultural imaginary. Third is the shifting terrain of gender and feminist politics, a key dimension of which is the necessary reworking of feminist thought in the wake of a radically altered biomedical and biotechnological landscape. Under the rubric of Estranged Bodies, the collection considers themes of dissolution and the fragility of the body/subject read through bodily catastrophe, radical body modification and extreme medical intervention. Also considered is the notion of assemblage – the provisional coming together of disparate parts – which encourages a rethinking of questions of reconstituted, displaced and re-placed bodies. (shrink)

What is so striking about Breaking Bad is how centrally impairment and disability feature in the lives of the characters of this series. It is unusual for a television series to cast characters with visible or invisible impairments. On the rare occasions that television shows do have characters with impairments, these characters serve no purpose other than to contribute to their ‘Otherness.’ Breaking Bad not only centralizes impairment, but impairment drives and sustains the story lines. I use three interrelated themes (...) from Disability Scholarship to analyze Breaking Bad. The first theme, Bodily Control, is that good bodies are controlled bodies and that uncontrolled, messy bodies are frightening, bad bodies. Indeed, the messiness of impairment and disability is so bad, that impaired and disabled individuals are excluded or shut out or excluded from many areas of public life. The second theme, Normalcy, is that the effect of hiding away impairment, of attempting to conceal disability, is that society becomes defined by, and structured around, the concept of normalcy. Normalcy, being normal, attaining and maintaining normalcy, is the preoccupation of most in society. To fail to be normal, or to fall from what is considered to be normal, is a source of tremendous anxiety for most people. These two themes, Bodily Control and Normalcy are conceptually connected: impairment, disease and dying are so feared because they are socially invisible and, therefore unknown and unknowable. They are the undiscussable taboos. The third theme, Bodily Realism, is that having a realistic view of the body, which would at minimum require accepting the fact that human bodies are fragile things, prone to disease and accident and are ultimately destined to die, makes one more at ease in the world, and able to live better lives and live as a better person. Indeed, so the argument goes, our lives would be richer, more rewarding—emotionally and morally—if we cared less about normalcy because of a dread of abnormalcy, but instead learned to accept if not positively value the physical variability of human existence. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to focus on the body as instrument or means in performance-art. Since the body is no monolithic given, the body is approached in terms of its constitutive layers, and this may enable us to conceive of the mechanisms that make performances possible and operational, i.e. those bodily mechanisms that are implicitly or explicitly controlled or manipulated in performance. Of course, the exploitation of these bodily layers is not solely responsible for the generation (...) of meaning in performance. Yet, it is that what fundamentally /enables/ the generation of sense and signification in performance-art. To approach the body in terms of its layers, from body image and body schema to in-depth body, may partly answer the complexity at work in art performances, since these concepts enable us to consider, on a theoretical level, the body as represented object, as subject, as motor means for being-in-the-world, as origin of subjectivity and emotions, as hidden but most intimate place of impersonal life processes, as possibly distant image, as sensitive, fragile and plastic entity, as something we own and are owned by, as our most personal and yet extremely strange body. (shrink)

On the heels of colonization, missionization, capitalistic development and globalization, contemporary members of the Navajo Nation are daily inundated with a variety of tensions associated with the `politics of identity'. Based on recent consultations with Navajo of all walks of life about how they accommodate biomedical technologies within their religiously and medically pluralistic world, this article demonstrates how Navajo people anchor relatedness within their sacred space through the use of language, detached bodily substances or parts, and ritualized practices. These (...) speech acts and practices, which are routinely done in the simultaneous process of person-and-place building, are also done to intentionally reinforce fragile social relations or perhaps more importantly to re-embed disrupted social relations through the process of emplacement. Using ethnographic information about Navajo views on the bioeconomy of excorporated bodily substances, this article considers how Navajo people specifically use decisions regarding blood donation or transfusion to strengthen individual and collective identity. (shrink)

This essay seeks to engage critically with the transhumanist goal of achieving the technological possibility of transferring consciousness into a computer. The general aim of the critical impulse of this essay is to interpret the various techno-optimistic attempts at transcending the bodily condition of life as being a kind of modern-day necromancy. By alluding to the magical or ritual notion of necromancy, this essay will show how the rationale behind Transhumanism and mind-transfer are premised on a desire to overcome (...) life itself by becoming immortal. Necromancy, whereby a sorcerer or practitioner suspends the dialectics of life and death, elevates the human to an inhuman position by attacking the very foundation of life itself – reviving the dead. This essay will juxtapose Transhumanism with necromancy by interpreting the goal to develop mind-transferring technologies in relation to texts that describe various technological means for practicing the art of necromancy or dark magic. By reinterpreting Transhumanism in this manner, this essay will show how the ritualistic, magical, or mythical foundations, that humanity had earlier called upon to overcome the fragility of their bodies have survived in the premises that underlining the modern-day endeavors to overcome the body via technological means. (shrink)

Traditional health sciences (including nursing) paradigms, conceptual models, and theories have relied heavily upon notions of the ‘person’ or ‘patient’ that are deeply rooted in humanistic principles. Our intention here, as a collective academic assemblage, is to question taken‐for‐granted definitions and assumptions of the ‘person’ from a critical posthumanist perspective. To do so, the cinematic works of filmmaker David Cronenberg offer a radical perspective to revisit our understanding of the ‘person’ in nursing and beyond. Cronenberg's work explores bodily transformation (...) and mutation, with the body as a fragile and malleable vessel. Cronenberg's work allows us to interrogate the body in all its complexity, contingency, and hybridity and provides avenues of rupture within current understandings of ‘the person’. Reinventing the definition of what it means to be human, critical posthumanism offers opportunities to both critique humanist theories and build affirmative futurities. Also drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, specifically, their concept of becoming, we propose a critical posthumanist alternative to the conceptualization of the person in the health sciences, that of the becoming‐mutant, so frequently explored in Cronenberg's films. Such a conceptualization permits the inclusion of various technological interventions of the contemporary subject: The postperson. This position offers the health science disciplines a radical reconceptualization of the conceptual and theoretical approaches, extending beyond those trapped within the quagmire of humanistic principles. (shrink)

Among the reasons that Whitehead is such an interesting philosopher is that his work resonates across philosophical traditions. This collection develops connections between Whiteheadian concepts and recent European thinkers. The purpose is not simply to compare, however, but, as editor Jeremy Fackenthal suggests, to develop a Whiteheadian thinking “in tandem” with European philosophers in order to create disruptions or “dislocations” in thought that can engender creative approaches to contemporary problems.One general feature of the book deserves mention at the outset, though (...) I will return to it later in the review: although phenomenology and hermeneutics are each represented in the volume, roughly half of the essays focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze (if we group these together with essays focused on “new materialism,” which is connected with Deleuze, the proportion is more like two-thirds). This will be no surprise, since Deleuze is the European philosopher who was most appreciative of Whitehead. And yet, the result is that the conversation with “continental philosophy” is highly selective.The book is organized into three parts, each comprised of three essays. In part 1, “Technological and Systematic Dislocations,” William S. Hamrick brings Whitehead into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of “the flesh” to suggest an ecological ontology capable of overcoming the instrumentalization of nature. Hamrick's strategy is to read Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty as contributing to an “ontological foundation” for a sustainable civilization (18). Bo Eberle writes about the “quantified self” suggested in new, wearable self-monitoring technologies. Drawing on Whitehead's notion of causal efficacy, Eberle argues that devices such as Fitbit give us access to bodily states that bypasses the standard ways we are aware of ourselves (i.e., through consciousness). He goes further to argue that, like all ways of knowing, wearable technologies are selective, and that the selection reflects the interests of the manufacturers and promotes a certain kind of subjectivity (in the case of Fitbit, a subjectivity that is oriented toward “getting your steps in”). Whitehead's epistemology thus enables the critic of wearable technologies to understand how contemporary experience and self-understanding is shaped not simply by recent technological mediations but by the material interests embedded in them. J.R. Hustwit and Carl Dyke take on what they call “activist” uses of Whitehead that naively (in their judgment) suggest that a non-relational substance metaphysics is to blame for most of our social ills. They employ the theory of complex adaptive systems in conversation with Whitehead and Antonio Gramsci to show that, in fact, achieving significant social change is far more difficult and even unpredictable than mere insertion of better ideas into public discourse. Dominant hegemonies have ways of adapting and absorbing attempts to undermine them. Here Hustwit and Dyke draw on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur to suggest that resistance to the dominant hegemony is nevertheless always possible because of the vagueness of discourse, allowing a plurality of competing interpretations and thus fractures in the dominant hegemony. However, even this kind of resistance is impossible to control and its effects incapable of being entirely predicted. To the essay's titular question, “Can Whitehead save the world?” the authors answer, “No.”In part 2, “Animal/Human Dislocations,” Jeremy Fackenthal draws on the new materialism of Rosi Braidotti (and Deleuze) along with Whitehead to argue for a “process-relational” nomadism that culminates in a “becoming-imperceptible.” His reading together of Whitehead and Braidotti creates the opportunity to recast the former's concept of objective immortality in such a way that it does not refer to death so much as to being diffused into a relational network. The satisfaction of an actual occasion may be taken as its translation into its effects among its relations. Fackenthal argues that this becoming-imperceptible makes possible a sustainable presence within a fragile network of life. Deena M. Lin uses Whitehead, Braidotti, and Judith Butler to lay out a vision of human life as precarious and deserving attention, care, and solidarity. She presses this vision as a direct moral assault on US (Trump's) policy toward Syrian refugees. Going further, she draws on Braidotti's posthuman account of zoe to argue for universal connection and solidarity with all life that should foster, as the title of her essay puts it, “Welcoming of Syrian Life.” Tano Posteraro offers an intriguing essay drawing on Jakob von Uexküll's account of animal experience. Posteraro argues that Uexküll's notion of an animal's Umwelt, shaped by its distinctive perceptual apparatus, needs to be supplemented by Whitehead's notion of prehension to account for the active dimension of animal perception. Rather than a passive registering of animal environments, Posteraro argues that the latter are constructed, and that concepts (or conceptual prehensions) should be understood as tools with which such environments are constructed.In part 3, “Time, the World, and Abstraction,” three essays probe ways that Whiteheadian and Deleuzian themes may resonate critically and constructively. Kris Klotz brings the thought of Whitehead and Deleuze together to inquire about how alternatives to present social forms are envisioned. He argues that, for Whitehead, every actual occasion involves a selection of some features of the past, and, further, that every selection is also an abstraction from the concrete welter of influences impinging on it. For Whitehead, then, to envision alternatives involves a critique of abstractions, a reinstatement of the concrete plurality of possibilities. This, for Whitehead, is what rationality does: it works at restoring the concrete, and, with it, a series of alternatives that have been eclipsed. To this Whiteheadian analysis, Klotz adds Deleuze and Guattari's critique of “opinion.” For Deleuze and Guattari, opinion is not an idiosyncrasy but a consensus to which differences of experience are subjected. Philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari, must always struggle against opinion in order to bring alternatives to light. These conceptions of reason/philosophy, Klotz argues, represent useful ways to critique inequalities and other social wrongs that are embedded in the social forms that are routinely taken for granted. Elijah Prewitt-Davis uses a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, along with philosophical innovations of Foucault, Deleuze, and Whitehead, to offer a distinctive account of power. Prewitt-Davis calls attention to Deleuze's important book on Leibniz, The Fold, and to how Whitehead's concept of prehension lies at its center. The upshot is that power is not reduced to dominance but, instead, is at work wherever any occasion of experience persists amid the onslaught of the influence of other occasions. Power, as Deleuze wrote, is the capacity to be affected—and to decide how to constitute oneself anew. Keith Robinson offers a detailed account of Whitehead's epistemology along with a reading of Deleuze's analysis of temporality to suggest that there is a common trajectory that seeks to undermine what the title of the essay describes as the “Bifurcation of Nature” (i.e., the separation of natural phenomena and human experience) within the dominant Western philosophical tradition.There is much of value in the volume as a whole. Aside from staging what Spinoza might have called good encounters between Whitehead and a number of continental philosophers, enhancing the conceptual power of each, the contributors are able to make a case that these philosophical trajectories, when read together, have much to contribute to our understanding of and response to the pressing issues of the day. In addition, readers who are interested in the relationship between Whitehead and the new materialism will find this volume to be a helpful resource, stocked with fine examples of how to sharpen new materialist thinking with Whitehead and how to read contemporary contexts through these lenses. On the other hand, this book is not a handbook nor a comprehensive reference. The organizational logic behind its division into sections is murky and the amount of attention given to particular continental philosophers as opposed to others appears somewhat arbitrary: there are recent continental philosophers who get little to no attention at (Derrida, Malabou, Žižek, Agamben, Latour, Nancy, for example), several of whom might prove to be quite interesting to read “in tandem” with Whitehead. Perhaps that is just to say that there are many more essays to be written. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, the body was seen as both an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic entity. In the former case, its individual development, it was manifestly changeable, developing from embryo to maturity and thence to a state of decay. But in the latter case, concerning its development as a species, the question was an open one. Was its phylogenetic nature a stationary snapshot of the slow process of evolution, or was this too mutable? Historians have emphasised that the question (...) of acquired inheritance remained open into the twentieth century; this paper explores how various constructions of the individual as a phylogenetic episode—a stage in the race’s evolution—related to representations of the body in the same period.A discussion of the work of the brothers Josef and Karel Čapek offers a contextualised answer to the question of bodily representation. Karel Čapek explored the nature of the ‘average man’ through two different organisms, the robot and the amphibian, epitomes respectively of corporeal permanence and plasticity. Josef Čapek , along with other members of the Group of Plastic Artists, explored visual representations of the body that challenged cubist Bergsonian norms. In so doing, he affirmed what his brother also held: that despite the constrictions imposed by the oppressive political conditions in which the Czechs found themselves, the individual body was a fragile but fluid entity, capable of effecting change upon the future evolution of humankind. (shrink)

There are few doubts about the significance of science and technology for modern human culture and society. But as historians, we are still struggling to find appropriate descriptive terms to capture the broad processes of transformation brought about by “techno-science,” the merging of technical production and modern institutionalized science. This dissertation argues that the term “experience” may serve as such an analytic lens in the specific historical setting of German aviation research from the 1920s through 1945. I reconstruct, on the (...) one hand, the theorization of experience as a concept by the technical physicist Paul von Handel, influenced by the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington’s distinction between "scientific" and "everyday" experience. On the other hand, I use the term as a historian’s analytic concept to investigate practices in the context of flight experiments that I take to be constitutive of my historical actors’ experiences. These are recordings of experimental pilots’ cognitive judgements and bodily actions, some of them—such as in-flight note taking—continuous with older cultural technologies. On both of these levels of analysis, I explore the different resonances of “experience” as a term with a legacy as a central epistemological concept in the modern sciences, and as capturing the changing everyday reality in an increasingly technicized environment. My analysis of the textual theorization and simultaneous practical constitution of "techno-scientific experience" serves to read in a new light the story of the pilot and physicist Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg. Of Jewish descent, Schiller chose to work for the Luftwaffe, the German air force, until her death in 1945 on a flight searching for her husband, Count Alexander Stauffenberg, who was imprisoned after his brother’s failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. The concept and practical reality of “experience” are key to understanding the two striking choices Schiller made as intrinsically connected: the professional choice of working simultaneously as a pilot and a physicist, and the political choice of supporting the Reich’s war effort. Schiller’s story may be understood as exemplifying the fragile identity of the experiencing and the knowing self in 20th-century techno-scientific modernity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sigewiza’s CureJennifer H. Radden (bio)Keywordsbiopsychosocial model, Hildegard of Bingen, associationist presuppositions, causation, power of suggestionSuzanne Phillips and Monique Boivin provide us with a sympathetic and compelling account of how the various elements of Hildegard’s sophisticated amalgam of ritual, magic, religion, dietary and other medical remedies, caring, and community, formed a seamless cure for Sigewiza’s affliction. Whether Hildgard’s approach reflects an early instance of the biopsychosocial “model” is a separate (...) claim, and may be challenged. But that her ministrations somehow effected a cure in this case seems—if not without a doubt, then very likely.Descriptions of Sigewiza’s condition, with its “clumping together of blackness and steam” caused by a “constellation of humors,” echo those of other medieval writers speaking of the humoral disorder of melancholia—at that time an encompassing category for a range of symptoms and syndromes that would today be assigned as different mental disorders. In these descriptions a variety of explanations for mental illness are quite typically introduced, including biological, social, supernatural, dietary and astrological ones. Phillips and Boivin take care to point out that Hildegard was not offering her remedies as alternatives, but rather proposing them as at work jointly and in a range of causal directions, exhibiting mutual influence, and feedback loops. As these authors say, multiple explanations “were often held simultaneously... in reference to a specific case” (Phillips and Boivin 2007, XX). And the factors that might cause the system to move out of balance are many: food, emotions, the soul, the mind, actions, and spiritual forces. So although deeds may cause bodily changes and their psychological accompaniments, “problems in the diet might affect the humors which would then have psychological effects, which demons might... use as opportunities to cause further trouble in the spirit, mind, and body” (Phillips and Boivin 2007, 365).What first struck me about Hildegard’s description of these many distinct causes interacting in complex ways is its compatibility with the multi-causal accounts of depression (and other mental disorder) frequently proffered in our own time. Daily habits (e.g., diet, sleep and exercise regimes), genetic predispositions, including biological states of fragility, external events, experiences of loss, social roles, and cultural beliefs—not to mention spontaneous recovery, and placebo effects—are all regularly implicated in the onset and course of conditions such as depression.Still, the similarity to these modern causal accounts may be somewhat misleading and we must beware of overstating it. In favoring and pressing on Hildegard’s holistic understanding, moreover, Phillips and Boivin perhaps insufficiently emphasize significant dissimilarities between Hildegard’s and our contemporary accounts.It is the interaction between the various elements making up Sigewiza’s cure that is most noteworthy [End Page 373] in this account, as Phillips and Boivin recognize. Yet that relationship itself seems in some ways surprisingly problematic: difficult for us to make sense of, and profoundly unmodern. Granted, we think we see the way these approaches probably influenced how Sigewiza felt and responded; but it is not so clear how Hildegard saw things. Like a lot of thinking in medieval times, Hildegard’s account provides us with glimpses of an understanding of the world that today looks prescientific and in that respect, almost precausal. (So, to the extent that the biopsychosocial model is understood as a causal one, the case of Sigewiza may exemplify it only inexactly.)It is not merely the range and type of causes, including supernatural and astrological ones, in accounts such as Hildegard’s that distinguish it from today’s analyses. It is also the reliance of such accounts on what seems to be a different metaphysics, one of associations or qualities.Associationist presuppositions can be found in accounts of health and illness from before, during, and long after, Hildegard’s time. Three examples of this pervasive, but puzzling thinking serve to illustrate. The melancholiac’s perceived swarthiness and darkened skin color—regularly noted from the time of the Greek physicians and an established part of the medieval iconography in images of melancholy—were not, or not primarily, thought to be a causal result of the darkness of his bile, as one might suppose. Instead, this coloring seems... (shrink)

The question of bodylines of the memory in the eschatological perspective During last decades the cognitive sciences have progressed a lot in analysing the link between mind and body on the field of philosophy of mind. The results of the body-mind investigations influence largely also theology. The classical theological thought considers the will, the reason and the memory as faculties of the soul. However, contemporary neuroscience attempts, with some success, to discover physical substrates of these faculties, which impacts also philosophy (...) of the mind. In this perspective, mutability and fragility of human body that is, according to psychologists, the memory’s ground, as well as human identity taken in its theological understanding, determined by the memory but transcending the temporal life, require some re-analysis of the spiritual dimension of the memory and some connection between the spiritual and the bodily sphere in the perspective of relation of the man with God. Though, theology must respect the scientific solutions of the body-mind question. In order to undertake it, the very object of theology and neuroscience has to be analysed to ascertain whether the memory examined by both sciences constitutes the same phenomenon. Then, one should analyse the philosophical assumptions of their discourses. Only these preliminary inquiries will allow to determine the philosophical area to build an integral reflexion. In turn, only this area may constitute the basis for such an anthropological-theological system that could retain its integrity vis-à-vis the discoveries of neuroscience. (shrink)

This chapter, which deals with the notions of affectivity and engagement, explores the internal connection between basic affects to get at the emergence of affectivity. Additionally, it presents a discussion of motivation and the interplay of affectivity and engagement. Basic affects consist of needs, wants, and desires. Needs and then wants involve a kind of circumspective seeing in which ‘felt’ values are as much a part of objects as their utility. Intentions-in-action are rooted in basic affects. The basic types of (...) affects are each triadically structured with the moments of each type being dyadically organised. The affectivity circuit usually begins with what is not yet a profile coming to prominence out of a dark background. The circuit of engagement is inducted by a bodily drive seeking resolution. (shrink)

This paper explores the principle that knowledge is fragile, in that whenever S knows that S doesn’t know that S knows that p, S thereby fails to know p. Fragility is motivated by the infelicity of dubious assertions, utterances which assert p while acknowledging higher-order ignorance whether p. Fragility is interestingly weaker than KK, the principle that if S knows p, then S knows that S knows p. Existing theories of knowledge which deny KK by accepting a Margin (...) for Error principle can be conservatively extended with Fragility. (shrink)

This book is a study of ancient views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek (...) thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. The Fragility of Goodness has proven to be important reading for philosophers and classicists, and its non-technical style makes it accessible to any educated person interested in the difficult problems it tackles. This new edition features an entirely new preface by Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)

How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in these times, with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? Bodily Natures considers these questions by grappling with powerful and pervasive material forces and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. Drawing on feminist theory, environmental studies, and the sciences, Stacy Alaimo focuses on trans-corporeality, or movement across bodies and nature, which (...) has profoundly altered our sense of self. By looking at a broad range of creative and philosophical writings, Alaimo illuminates how science, politics, and culture collide, while considering the closeness of the human body to the environment. (shrink)

Human thought is unable to acknowledge the reality of affliction. To acknowledge affliction means saying to oneself: I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose.

Medicine seeks to overcome one of the most fundamental fragilities of being human, the fragility of good health. No matter how robust our current state of health, we are inevitably susceptible to future illness and disease, while current disease serves to remind us of various frailties inherent in the human condition. This article examines the relationship between fragility and uncertainty with regard to health, and argues that there are reasons to accept rather than deny at least some forms (...) of uncertainty. In situations of current ill health, both patients and doctors seek to manage this fragility through diagnoses that explain suffering and provide some certainty about prognosis as well as treatment. However, both diagnosis and prognosis are inevitably uncertain to some degree, leading to questions about how much uncertainty health professionals should disclose, and how to manage when diagnosis is elusive, leaving patients in uncertainty. We argue that patients can benefit when they are able to acknowledge, and appropriately accept, some uncertainty. Healthy people may seek to protect the fragility of their good health by undertaking preventative measures including various tests and screenings. However, these attempts to secure oneself against the onset of biological fragility can cause harm by creating rather than eliminating uncertainty. Finally, we argue that there are good reasons for accepting the fragility of health, along with the associated uncertainties. (shrink)

In _The Fragility of Things_, eminent theorist William E. Connolly focuses on several self-organizing ecologies that help to constitute our world. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems, some of which harbor creative capacities, are depreciated by that brand of neoliberalism that confines self-organization to economic markets and equates the latter with impersonal rationality. Neoliberal practice thus fails to address the fragilities it exacerbates. Engaging a diverse range of thinkers, from Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Hesiod, and Immanuel Kant to (...) Voltaire, Terrence Deacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alfred North Whitehead, Connolly brings the sense of fragility alive as he rethinks the idea of freedom. Urging the Left not to abandon the state but to reclaim it, he also explores scales of politics below and beyond the state. The contemporary response to fragility requires a militant pluralist assemblage composed of those sharing affinities of spirituality across differences of creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. (shrink)

In this article thinking on corporate social responsibility is compared with the dominant political theory of the market: theneoclassical theory. The comparison shows that thinking on CSR fundamentally collides with that theory. For example, their respectivenormative views on man are incompatible, as are their respective views on the modus operandi of the market. Given that CSR is desirable it follows that a new political theory of the market is needed. This article suggests some initial steps toward developing that new political (...) theory of the market. For example, it defends the proposition that the neoclassical idea of the market as a harmonic sphere must be replaced by the idea of the market as a fragile system. (shrink)

John Rawls's transition from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism was driven by his rejection of Theory's account of stability. The key to his later account of stability is the idea of public reason. We see Rawls's account of stability as an attempt to solve a mutual assurance problem. We maintain that Rawls's solution fails because his primary assurance mechanism, in the form of public reason, is fragile. His conception of public reason relies on a condition of consensus that (...) we argue is unrealistic in modern, pluralistic democracies. After rejecting Rawls's conception of public reason, we offer an ‘indirect alternative’ that we believe is much more robust. We cite experimental evidence to back up this claim. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between the government and the media in post-apartheid South Africa. An overview is given of key developments and tensions between the government and the media in the first 10 years of democracy and the ethical frameworks underlying the respective positions. An overview of the debate between the so-called "national interest" and the "public interest" is given, and linked to normative ethical frameworks of libertarianism vis-a-vis communitarianism. A mean between the 2 is suggested in the form (...) of mutualism, whereas the necessity for conceptual clarification in debating the relation between the government and the media is emphasized. (shrink)

Are fanatical beliefs rational? This paper examines this question. After outlining two arguments for the rationality of fanatical beliefs, based respectively on what I call the "crippled epistemology" explanation and the "echo chambers" explanation, the paper rejects these arguments by appeal to considerations related to higher-order evidence. Then it explains what defending the rationality of fanatical beliefs actually requires. From this, it derives the practical conclusion that radicalization can be prevented and the growth of fanaticism stalled by preventing the encroachment (...) of "fragile values.". (shrink)

We argue that the main objections against two central tenets of a Jamesian account of the emotions, i.e. that (1) different types of emotions are associated with specific types of bodily feelings (Specificity), and that (2) emotions are constituted by patterns of bodily feeling (Constitution), do not succeed. In the first part, we argue that several reasons adduced against Specifity, including one inspired by Schachter and Singer’s work, are unconvincing. In the second part, we argue that Constitution, too, (...) can withstand most of the objections raised against it, including the objection that bodily feelings cannot account for the outward-looking and evaluative nature of emotions. In both sections, we argue that the kinds of felt bodily changes posited by a Jamesian account of emotions are best understood in terms of felt states of action-readiness. (shrink)

The aim of our paper is to show that there is a sense of body that is enactive in nature and that enables to capture the most primitive sense of self. We will argue that the body is primarily given to us as source or power for action, i.e., as the variety of motor potentialities that define the horizon of the world in which we live, by populating it with things at hand to which we can be directed and with (...) other bodies we can interact with. We will show that this sense of body as bodily self is, on the one hand, antecedent the distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership, and, on the other, it enables and refines such distinction, providing a conceptual framework for the coherent interpretation of a variety of behavioral and neuropsychological data. We will conclude by positing that the basic experiences we entertain of our selves as bodily selves are from the very beginning driven by our interactions with other bodies as they are underpinned by the mirror mechanism. (shrink)

Recognizing the potential hidden artistic contributions of persons with dementia opens new opportunities for interpretation and potential communication. This visual essay explores the authors’ responses to the fragile objects of art produced by a person with severe dementia and examines what may be learned from them.

This article explores the role of second-order anger in the formation of resistant feminist space through the work of María Lugones and Sara Ahmed. I argue that this incommunicative form of anger can operate as a bridge between two senses of resistant spatiality in Lugones, connecting the hangout, which is a collective and transgressive space for alternative sense making, and the cocoon, which is a solitary and germinative space of tense internal transformation. By weaving connections with Ahmed’s concept of feminist (...) fragile sheltering, I demonstrate that the insulating character of second-order anger need not be equated with spatial solitude. Rather, given its orientation toward a future becoming away from oppressed subjectivity, germinative cocooning can be understood as constitutive of collective, feminist, and resistant spaces. I conclude, therefore, that feminist spaces ought to shelter second-order angers and embrace fragility as a condition of resistant transformation. (shrink)

Ordinary common knowledge is formally expressed by strong probabilistic common belief. How strong exactly? The question can be answered by drawing from the similar equivalence, recently explored, between plain and probabilistic individual beliefs. I argue that such a move entails that common knowledge displays a double fragility: as a description of a collective state and as a phenomenon, because it can respectively disappear as group size increases, or more worryingly as the epistemic context changes. I argue that despite this (...) latter fragility, the effects of common knowledge on action are robust. Unfortunately, this in turn leads to a third fragility, that of the concept of common knowledge, which threatens to collapse on probabilistic common belief. This also reveals a disanalogy between the individual and the collective cases. I finally pinpoint the subtle difference entailed by the two concepts, expressed in terms of the attitude towards contrary evidence or of the agents’ awareness. As a result, common knowledge can be defended as a concept, which refers to a fragile yet distinct collective attitude. (shrink)

Individuals suffering from depression consistently report experiencing a lack of connectedness with others. David Karp (2017, 73), in his memoir and study of depression, has gone so far to describe depression as “an illness of isolation, a disease of disconnectedness”. It has become common, in phenomenological circles, to attribute this social impairment to the depressed individual experiencing their body as corporealized, acting as a barrier between them and the world around them (Fuchs 2005, 2016). In this paper, I offer an (...) alternative view of the experience of social disconnectedness in depression, suggesting that rather than necessarily experiencing their body as object-like, the depressed individual’s bodily is saturated with experiences of lethargy, tiredness, heaviness, sadness, hopelessness and so on, to the exclusion of being able to bodily connect to others. I suggest that depression does not involve a complete social impairment but a specific impairment of affective forms of interpersonal experience. (shrink)